I went to the ID conference here in Dallas.
I met Hillary Farrar the author of Mama Bear Apologetics and bought her book. The image is I guess one of a mama bear defending her cubs? From……evolution?
Anyway Stephen Meyer gave a talk that basically argued protein folding could be used in ID arguments.
If you have any thoughts about that I want to engage both local bio profs and ID enthusiasts.
This year at some point, locally.
I looked up a preview of the book. Every chapter of part two addresses a particular cultural idea. One of them is naturalism.
People who believe in naturalism probably support the theory of evolution. But people who support the theory of evolution do not automatically hold to the idea of naturalism. Evolutionary creation stands in stark opposition to naturalism.
This is a Biologos article that was eventually deleted (don’t know why).
I’ve had nightmares where bacteria gain the ability to consume most plastic.
Stephen Meyer and his colleague Michael Behe started on the wrong foot by making it axiomatic that gradual evolution was impossible. To defend this view they advanced ideas and arithmetical non-sequiturs which have persuaded the entire biological science community to ignore them.
The reality is (simplifying here - will expand at length if that seems useful) that beneficial mutations tend to be minor improvements that take thousand-ish generations to displace the original gene, and arrive separately by the hundreds during a nominal thousand generation period.
You can call this a Team Walk. Its hallmark is to sneak up on the unaware and seem Irreducibly Complex, which Meyer takes to mean an Intelligent Designer doesn’t sneak anywhere, he just does the equivalent of photo-bombing the gene pool.
Meyer and Behe both hold well-earned PhDs, but neither of them seem anxious to solve the mysteries that confront them. Instead they allege that the butler did it and close the book.
Being mentally bright, their ability to stay ahead of the gullible is a wonder to look upon.
LOL
That’s priceless.
Yes, protein folding is just another example of “it can happen in a huge number of ways, therefore we can claim that folding in this particular way is extremely unlikely” while ignoring two key problems with that statistic:
I think that’s an overstatement. Vast swathes of the biological science community were unaware of their existence and needed no persuading to ignore them. It’s hard to overstate just how irrelevant ID and creationism are to most biologists.
I stand corrected.
There are also those that use terms like Christian naturalism instead of evolutionary creationism. They can mean the same thing and they can mean very different things. Some Christian naturalism rejects any and all supernatural events and some don’t. But regardless when talking with an atheist or young earth creationist, when the term evolutionary creationism or christian naturalism comes into play it never just ends but always requires more explaining. I’ve found I have less explaining to do with CN than with EC.
Normally when i say EC I then have to explain reject intelligent design and I don’t think magic is needed for science to work and so on. I have to dismiss far more of the supernatural this way. If I say CN I just have to show I accept a few of the supernatural aspects of Christianity.
Good point.
Because of your comment, I went searching for more info.
Two articles I found on their website seem to suggest that this book equates naturalism with evolution:
Just learned that my thirteen year old daughter sent a letter to her science teacher questioning her teaching evolution to the class. Apparently, this letter was so well written that her science teacher showed it to several other teachers and they even commended my little up-and-coming defender and theology nerd.
Dear Mrs. Wilson… A Letter from a Middle School Girl to Her Science Teacher (emphasis mine).
The more I study cellular functions, the more I realize that one has to choose to miss the fact that all of life is a series of micro-machines with goal-directedness that cannot be explained by the physics, chemistry, or biology of the system . If we can get our youth to understand these differences before they enter the materialist indoctrination camps of mainstream academia, the less likely they will be to drink the kool-aid when it is offered to them. And notice, I didn’t have to study any kind of “special” Christian science to see this obvious truth. Studying natural complexity is totally sufficient when coupled with a Biblical lens reminding us that “in Christ, all things are held together.” (Colossians 1:17) Scientists might call it the “strong nuclear force,” but that’s just fancy terminology for “it holds together and we’re not sure how.”
Explaining the “Science vs God” Myth to Kids (emphasis in original).
So I stand corrected.
The comments there are interesting, especially the ones where people assert that a Royal Society meeting where different presenters pointed to some gaps in evolutionary theory means “Evolution doesn’t work”; that struck me as looking at the scaffold on the side of my house and noticing that it leaves some places that can’t be reached and deciding that the scaffold was useless.
Another bit was the assertion that only in the U.S. is evolution regarded as unchallengeable. It is definitely challengeable within the extent shown at that 2016 Royal Society meeting! So I think that assertion comes from a viewpoint as above, i.e. the idea that because saying “evolution is nonsense” won’t get you anywhere in science institutions in the U.S. then evolution can’t be challenged.
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